Oblation: Essays, Parables, and Paradoxes

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Elements of this book, Oblation: Essays, Parables, and Paradoxes, defy reason. They do so for good reason. Much of what we do, much of what we think, is oblation: sacrifice, offering, to something or someone. The root of “oblation” (Hebrew: korban) is “to draw near” or “to dwell in.” It refers to what is brought[…]

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology examines the use of diagrams in anthropology to re-imagine how we think about, and challenge, intellectual histories. Highlighting the impossibility of escaping what different disciplines and institutions deem to be “past,” the author combines critical analysis of selected diagrams with an expansive, exploratory re-immersion in their aesthetic, ethical, and political potential.[…]

Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William[…]

On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Winter 2024

In 1936, at age nineteen, Dorothea Buck followed the trail of a star along the mudflats of her North Sea home, Wangerooge Island. Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, she was sterilized under Nazi law upon a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Buck lost her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher—the sterilized could not get a[…]

Taunting the Useful

FORTHCOMING Summer 2023

In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. Taunting the Useful seeks to unsettle notions of[…]

Static Palace

Published: 12/01/2022

In the face of unimaginably violent systems, our most vulnerable bodies — sick, disabled, unable to rise from bed — offer the resistance of imperative vulnerability. What can we learn from the body that cannot help but fail? How can porosity perform treachery within entrenched opressions? What kind of reading and relationship to text can[…]

Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms

FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

Ontohackers redefines what movement, worlds, and bodies are through the sense of proprioception reconceptualized as formless fluctuation field, a movement matrix that is itself also thought, and which underlies all life forms and fields including the inorganic. Our worlds are made of endless such entangled fields n-folding in never ending variation or enferance. The current[…]

Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI

Published: 03/02/2023

Before the company OpenAI publicly released their ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, Robert Leib had been a tester in OpenAI’s beta playground for GPT-3, a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine — a chatbot, or artificial intelligence. Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between Leib, a continental philosopher, and GPT-3’s hive mind[…]